Kaleigh Acord, violin
Lester Pines, narrator
Christopher Ramaekers, conductor
Kaleigh Acord, violin
Lester Pines, narrator
Christopher Ramaekers, conductor
Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 in E minor, "From the New World", Op. 95 (1893)
Coleridge-Taylor: Violin Concerto, Op. 80 (1912), featuring Kaleigh Acord
Copland: Lincoln Portrait (1942), featuring Lester Pines
Violinist and violist Kaleigh Acord completed a Doctor of Musical Arts at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music in December 2020, and her debut album of six unaccompanied violin works, Twenty-First Century American Storytellers, is available to stream through Spotify. Active as a chamber musician, Kaleigh has made guest appearances with several Madison-based series including Grace Presents, Willy Street Chamber Players, Oakwood Chamber Players, Chamber Music @ Art + Lit Lab, and the LunArt Festival. She spent summer 2023 as a fully-funded fellow at Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival in Colchester, VT, performing alongside both faculty and peers. At UW-Madison, she was a student of Soh-Hyun Park Altino and a recipient of the esteemed Paul Collins Fellowship. She also holds a Graduate Performance Diploma from the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, as well as a Masters of Music and an Undergraduate Diploma from the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, MA. Her previous teachers include Violaine Melancon and Laura Bossert. Kaleigh received Peabody’s 2016-17 Valerie Slingluff Violin Scholarship and debuted on WQXR’s McGraw Hill Financial Young Artist Showcase in March 2014, playing Schoenfeld's Souvenirs for Violin and Piano. Notable chamber music collaborations include those with the Hausmann Quartet, cellist Michael Kannen, and Tchaikovsky International Gold Medalist Sergey Antonov.
Kaleigh has taught violin and viola privately for over a decade, and since 2021 is a faculty member at Madison Conservatory and Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras' Music Makers. Both programs seek to address financial and social barriers that inhibit access to youth music education. Kaleigh coached chamber music for WYSO during 2021, led violin sectionals for UW’s Symphony Orchestra from 2017-19, acted as teaching assistant for Laura Bossert's violin and viola studios at Longy School of Music from 2012-15, mentored through El-Sistema-inspired string projects in the Boston area during 2013-15, and served on the Young Artist Faculty at Lyricafest Chamber Music Festival in Lincoln, MA from 2013-15.
A Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, Lester Pines is a respected advocate who concentrates his practice on civil and criminal trials, arbitrations, and civil appeals. For decades he has appeared in state and federal trial courts and before the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Wisconsin governors have relied on him for legal advocacy and advice, as did President Obama who sought his assistance for a friend in need of legal counsel in Wisconsin. In 1976 at the request of Wisconsin's governor, Lester, who had been an attorney for just over a year, negotiated the resolution of a prison uprising, ensuring the release of over a dozen hostages who were being held by armed prisoners in a barricaded building. Throughout his career, he has displayed that same level of confidence, skill, and courage on behalf of his clients.
Lester has tried and resolved numerous personal injury and commercial claims. He has represented clients in significant civil cases about the interpretation of Wisconsin's constitution and amendments to it, in race, sex, and LGBTQ discrimination matters, about restrictions on the right to vote, in defense of employees' rights, and to protect women's access to reproductive health care. In his criminal law practice, among many other cases, he has regularly defended public employees. For over 30 years he has been counsel to Madison's teachers' union and also represents the Service Employees International Union (SEIU Wisconsin), the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association (MTEA) and the Office & Professional Employees Union, Local 39 (OPEIU).
A host of Lester's Wisconsin appellate cases have addressed high-profile public policy matters. In 2020, representing Governor Tony Evers, he convinced the Wisconsin Supreme Court in SEIU v Vos (2020 WI 67) that the legislature's attempt to disrupt the executive branch by imposing onerous burdens on the Governor's provision of advice and guidance about statutes, rules and regulations to Wisconsin's citizens was unconstitutional.
For many years he was an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, teaching pre-trial civil advocacy. Lester is often called upon to speak before a variety of audiences on a host of legal issues and is one of the most written about and quoted attorneys in Wisconsin. National media as well, including the New York Times, have quoted him. In September 2017, he was featured in cover story in the Isthmus, a Madison weekly paper which you can read here: https://isthmus.com/news/cover-story/lester-pines-draws-on-faith-and-family-in-his-practice-and-b/